Dear editor,
Re: Tough decisions necessary.
Murray Presley’s recent defence of the BC Liberal budget ends with an Orwellian declaration.
“Our children deserve better and so do you!” he writes, as if to confirm the BC Liberal budget won’t leave any “financial problems to our children.”
Really? Reverse psychology and empty rhetoric like this won’t work on my peers.
I am a young British Columbian. I would like to tell all BC Liberals that the deficits you’re leaving my generation and the ones behind me are much more than just financial deficits. You cannot balance a budget on our backs and the short-term selloff of natural resources that should provide lasting intergenerational prosperity.
Youth in B.C. are inheriting structural deficits in access to affordable post-secondary education. The B.C. Liberals cut the non-repayable, needs-based grant program for post-secondary students in 2004-05 and we’ve watched student debt grow and tuition increase at almost twice the rate of inflation.
We’re inheriting ecological deficits — in the form of gutted environmental laws and an industrial endless growth paradigm we’re on the hook to clean up.
We’re also left with a deficit of democratic engagement, as the cynical moves of the BC Liberals over the past several election cycles coincides with declining voter participation.
Only 51 per cent of eligible voters exercised their democratic right in the last 2009 provincial election. Mostly this is attributed to a drop in the voter turnout of youth, who have never felt more alienated and excluded from the political machinery, its jargon and its fantasy future that ignores climate change.
But for all the deficits left to young British Columbians, we are up to the task of safeguarding our future. Over the next several weeks, that means we are Youth for Kassandra Dycke and the Comox Valley NDP.
Vanessa Scott,
Courtenay